How to Read Gawker in 2015

Gawker.com is going to slow down. Don't worry—as an editorial operation, we'll still be producing as much writing as we did before (probably even more). We're just going to put less of it on the front page.

Instead of publishing the majority of our stories directly to the front page, we'll be publishing them on to a set of subject-focused sub-blogs (a.k.a. "verticals," or, cutely, "diagonals"—I personally prefer to just borrow newspaper terminology wholesale and call them "sections"). Some of them—Valleywag, Defamer, Morning After—already exist. Others—focused on media, news, and politics—we've created.

The front page will update less frequently than it did before, and it will feel a bit more like the front page of a newspaper, with the best, most important, and most representative work from across the sections. At best that will mean exclusive stories, original reporting, strong arguments, funny jokes, breakout posts, and breaking news: The best and most popular of what Gawker is producing at any given moment.

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For a detailed explanation, you can read a memo about Gawker 2015 here. The capsule is: This is the best way to serve our readers the stories they want to read, and to give our writers the space to take the risks we want them to take.

It'll be messy, a lot of our most dedicated readers might hate it, and traffic will take a hit. But I think that we'll be rewarded in the long run by providing readers with more focused ways to get the stories they want, and by giving writers more freedom to experiment without "front page" pressure.